


keeper

by foundCarcosa



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-29
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-07-10 23:52:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7013650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will Graham is justly released from the facility, but home is like prison. Matthew Brown goes home at night on his own free will, but home is like prison.<br/>There's only one thing to be done.</p>
            </blockquote>





	keeper

It is impossible to work in a psychiatric facility without taking your work home with you; impossible to apathetically collect your paltry paycheck without becoming attached to the gritty off-white walls and the tiled floors waxed so meticulously that your soft-soled shoes squeak faintly as you walk; impossible to not absorb the psychotic luridness of the patients’ lives, inhaling madness like cigarette smoke, drawing it into your pores like pollution.

 _Pollution,_ Matthew thinks idly, his shoulder propped against the gritty off-white wall, dragging his knuckles over the cold iron bars that framed the now-empty cell. _Am I polluted? Now, or was I always?_

In his mind’s vivid eye, he imagines himself in a jumpsuit, blood thick and slow with tranquilisers and antipsychotics, perched on the spartan bunk and staring with vapid curiosity at the wall opposite. He imagines frustration, hot and jittery in his stomach, imagines fear like tepid and rank sweat, imagines abandonment, a bitter draught still searing the back of his throat. He imagines not being Matthew Brown, the slight and ghostly man who was unassuming at best and invisible at worst, who’d gotten his job by appearing so dreadfully ordinary that he’d almost been forgotten entirely, but imagines being Will Graham, the darkling celebrity, sick with the venom of undistilled clarity, burdened with a truth that no one else dared fathom.

It had been Matthew’s job to keep him, but on one of Matthew’s rare days off, they’d taken him, and Matthew had returned to an empty, sterile cell.

It had been Matthew’s job to keep him, that unwilling, stigmatic patron saint of lost souls, but Matthew had failed, first once, and then again, and he had never felt more alone.

\--

It is impossible to experience a residence at a psychiatric facility without taking your imprisonment home with you; without feeling the phantom prick of needles and the phantom spread of numbing agents in your bloodstream, without feeling as though cold iron surrounded you in your every waking moment, without staring dully at the trappings of your home and wondering who they belonged to – some former incarnation of yours, perhaps, but not to you, not anymore. Pills become food. Warmth becomes alien. Life becomes grey. If you were not already mad before they took you away, you are certainly mad when they release you, and yet they say you are rehabilitated.

In truth, Will Graham was, for all intents and purposes, absent.

He crouches, beckoning, and is surrounded by wriggling canine bodies, licked by raspy tongues and nosed by damp snouts, but it seems to be happening to someone else, some awkward but steady soul who did not need a psychiatrist with a heavy accent and impeccable taste to steer him in the way he should go, who made few friends but did not balk from solitude, who could sleep through the night without his sweating body straining towards bestial entities with hypnotic voices and dripping fangs.

Will Graham takes his medication, knocks it back with cool tap water, and stares in the bathroom mirror. A stranger stares unblinkingly back at him, calm and collected and empty.

Will Graham discards garment after garment, before settling for the shirt that feels the most like the starchy white jumper the orderlies wore. (When he buries his nose in it, a ghost of a scent greets him, and is gone just as quickly.)

Will Graham closes his eyes, and recalls an address. A name. A face, Cupid’s-bow lips smirking faintly, dark eyes looking up at him from under dark lashes.

_“You are my responsibility, and I have never been more honoured.”_

_“And when they release me?”_

_“They may release you, but you’ll still be here. You will always be here.  
You are mine, and I have never been more honoured.”_

Will Graham opens his eyes. Shudders. Shakes another pill into his damp palm. _That conversation never happened,_ he consoles himself, washing the pill down with tepid tap water, and going to bed.

\--

It is a balmy evening when the one they released comes calling; Matthew cooks shirtless, idly indulging every splatter of grease that licks his bare skin, singing snatches of the Soundgarden playing on the stereo in a low and musing voice.

_“Who are you?” the saint of sinners asked, and the keeper of sinners does not know how to respond._

_“You know my name.” The keeper of sinners twirls a pen between his fingers, raking his teeth over his bottom lip as he regards the saint, displaying amusement in his fathomless eyes. “What else would you know?”_

_“I know you are a killer.”_

_“Killers know killers.”_

_“I am not a killer.”_

_The keeper of sinners frowns, a flash of feigned expression on an unassuming and forgettable face. “Then… who are_ you?"

_The saint and the keeper regard each other in silence, and their dark eyes speak darker truths._

But it was not time to think about that. The potatoes were burning, edges turning charcoal black and smoke rising thick from the overheated pan. Matthew snuffs the flame and shifts the pan to a cold burner, fanning the smoke away from him, berating himself for his obsessive inattention, and the doorbell rings.

And rings again. And then comes the knocking, erratic and arrhythmic, and something makes Matthew hurry, wiping his hands on a dishtowel and scurrying towards the door, eyes alert, body tense.

Will Graham raises sunken eyes when Matthew opens the door to his home, little wider than a crack at first, then as wide as it will go when he sees who is hovering hunched and haunted on his doorstep.

“They released you,” the keeper of sinners intones, almost insolently.

Will Graham, unwilling saint of sinners, opens his mouth to say something, hitches in a breath, shudders. Fingers twitch, fingernails raw-edged and knuckles abraded, and Matthew steps back as if giving Will space to enter, when really he is stepping away from the violent urge to snatch the sickly man by the collar and _pull_ him in.

“Come on.” Matthew smiles faintly as Will hesitantly steps over the threshold and Matthew closes the door, a door made of wood and paint but no less secure than cold iron bars. Even shirtless and tousled, even far from the place of his employment, Matthew feels steady and capable as he takes Will’s sweat-damp head in his hands, feeling the pulse in Will’s temples slow down as the object of Matthew’s obsessive attention sinks gratefully into his care.

“What have you _done_ to me,” Will Graham seethes through gritted teeth, “who _are_ you,” feeling like he should be indignant, he should feel violated, that this orderly with the unassuming and guileless affect should have wormed his idolatrous way inside of Will and made him _need_ him, but further protest is blotted out by the drugging warmth of the keeper’s hands, the soft lilt of his voice.

“I am your keeper. I lost you, but you’ve come back to me,” Matthew murmurs, gently raking dark curls away from Will’s forehead and replacing them with his lips. “I have never been more honoured.”


End file.
